NPR's Alan Cheuse takes on Jews and slavery

April 3, 2011|By Chauncey Mabe, Sun Sentinel Correspondent

Alan Cheuse is a versatile writer, well regarded in certain circles, at least, for his short fiction, his travel books and his novels, including an impressively ambitious new one, "Songs of Slaves in the Desert."

But he's quite content to be best known as the book reviewer for NPR's "All Things Considered."

"It's an odd thing," Cheuse says, "but I'm grateful I can do that gig. We have 29 million listeners a week. God knows in this media climate I'm grateful anyone thinks of me other than my wife, my students and a few close friends."

A longtime writing professor at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., Cheuse, at 71, might be inclined to rest on a laurel or two. Instead, he's still swinging for the fences.

His latest novel takes on one of America's greatest, and most explosive, themes -- slavery. And in this case, Jewish slave owners in the pre-Civil War South.

"I worry, sure, about what black people will say," Cheuse says by phone from Portland, Ore., where he's on tour in support of the novel. "And I worry about what Jewish people will say."

"Songs of Slaves in the Desert" -- the flowery title comes from an anti-slavery poem by John Greenleaf Whittier -- centers on Nathaniel Pereira, "a perfect Manhattan lad," sent to inspect a family rice plantation in South Carolina.

Nathaniel has little interest in commerce, or the South, or rice, but he goes, only to be buffeted with an array of shocks and surprises, beginning almost immediately upon stepping off the boat in Charleston.

"And it was only an hour or so after my arrival here on a delightful morning," Nathaniel observes, "that I, a descendant of slaves from Egypt and Babylon, witnessed my first trading in human flesh."

Soon Nathaniel, repelled by the brutality of slavery all around him, finds himself attracted to a young slave named Eliza. As matters slowly simmer to a boil in the South, Cheuse pulls back to include a second narrative, this one focused on the slave trade, from the 1500s to the Civil War, from Timbuktu to South Carolina.

Cheuse says the hardest thing he's ever had to write was the chapter on the Middle Passage, the arduous voyage bearing slaves from Africa to North America.

"Song of Slaves in the Desert" is the product of more than a decade of research and thought as Cheuse strove to make the book as accurate as possible.

"Historically, in Judeo-Christian mythology, Jews were the original enslaved people," he says. "Jewish participation in slavery is not something many Jews know about or want to know about."

The genesis of the novel goes all the way back to Cheuse's college days, when he went to Lafayette College for one year before transferring to Rutgers. The president of his Jewish fraternity was an African-American named Leonard Jeffries.

In the 1990s, Cheuse says, Jeffries, by then head of the black studies program at Columbia University, caused a controversy with "sweeping" statements that "white people were ice people and black people were sun people."

Cheuse started reading up on the history of slavery and the South, off an on, and discovered "there was a rice grain or two of truth in what" Jeffries had to say about Jews and the slave trade.

"It's been on my mind for decades, but I've written full-bore over the last couple of years," Cheuse says. "I've found all kinds of personal ties."

For one, when he started the novel, Cheuse had no idea he would eventually dedicate the book to an African grandchild. But by the time he finished, his son and daughter-in-law had adopted an Ethiopian infant.

"That seemed the final brick in this path that I set into place," Cheuse says.